OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 3

in June 2007 two tv producers phoned me out of the blue to talk about adapting my Fate of the Artist to the small screen and I found myself having a series of daytime sessions at assorted pubs as we got to know each others’ ideas about what such an adaptation might look like. They were pleasantly surprised to find that Fate was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and it was suggested that the Snooter in fact showed greater dramatic/comedic potential. One thing we particularly agreed on was that there was scope for a combination of live action and some kind of animation and we talked about the ways this had been done previously. I mean specifically in relation to the cartoonist and his work, the artist seeing his drawings come to life. You have to start with the first, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo of 1911: "The Famous cartoonist of the NY Herald and his moving comics. The first artist to attempt drawing pictures that will move." Even at nearly a hundred years on McCay still charms. And the magic is still persuasive too! I was happily watching for a couple of minutes before it occurred to me that you can't draw with a dip pen on an upright surface.



Then there is the the old 1970 tv show My World and Welcome to it, based on the stories and drawings of James Thurber, with William Windom playing cartoonist John Monroe, which I told the guys about. We went to some trouble to get hold of a copy of the whole series and I wrote about it here. I found the following on Youtube, which I think is the intro to the first half hour show:



It was American Splendor that got the producers thinking about our proposed show in the first place. This image of Pekar walking through a simple drawing of a street (composited for the DVD ?), is among the most expressive things under the ironic 'American Splendor' banner. Pekar's slouch is in perfect harmony with his backdrop


And the movie’s opening credit sequence, borrows the multiple levels of synchronous action possible on a comic book page.


Pekar is played by Actor Paul Giamatti and also by animated drawings, but over and above that Pekar also appears as himself.
In one incident Giamatti as Pekar goes to see a stage play based on Pekar’s comic books, so that the actor playing Pekar on film is watching Pekar played by another actor on stage.

The artist and the artist's drawings-come-to-life. The idea has a long and worthy history. Does Campbell have anything to add to it? I find myself excited by the challenge.
(more to come)

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 2

up to the moment I was having a beer with the two tv producers, and leaving out random video taped interviews, and a couple of short super-8s I made when I was a kid, I had never been practically involved in any film project. Except for once when I found myself in front of a camera in September 2006, for a shoestring budget movie and I don't know if it ever was, or ever will be, completed. It was for a fellow who likes my books and thought it would be a hoot if I took a walk-on cameo part in his movie. So I was a wealthy art buyer scrutinizing some antique paintings in an actual gallery which was closed for refurbishing but to which they had acquired access for a day. I was unnamed but when the young lady, playing the manager of the gallery, comes in and addresses me, I suggested that I ought to be named. What name? How about 'Mr Campbell' I offered, and so it was. I wasn't required to speak, just look contemplative, walk the length of the gallery, then answer my mobile phone before leaving in a hurry. Never having owned one, I kept squidging that part of the performance. If nothing else, I've got a still of me imagining I'm in some old film noir classic.


(more next time)

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 1

there's a conceit in The Fate of the Artist, and I choose the word deliberately, in which I posit that a film crew is in my house shooting for a proposed arty documentary which revolves around Campbell. We will have observed this activity a couple of times before wee Hayley Campbell explains it (in words put into her mouth by me, for the sake of fiction):


This particular thread runs up and down all the levels and modes of the story, with what is seen in one part explained later in another where we don't expect it. The principal player in this drama is the actor Richard Siegrist, who plays Campbell. In this pretend newspaper daily strip cartoon we see him in front of the camera:


We can presume it's a 'green screen' setup because we see the same shot later in the full colour painted mode with the rest of the picture supposedly added at the editing stage:


Of all the mischief in the book, I was inclined to feel that this notion was a little dishonest, because I really couldn't picture a situation in which anyone would be filming my real-life stories. (Let's leave the From Hell movie aside, which is a different beast altogether and I really wasn't physically involved with that). But within a few months of the release of Fate I found myself having a beer with a couple of television producers.
(More next time)

a whole bunch of Campbelliana seems to have appeared overnight. The lovely Jessa Crispin is interviewing me at Bookslut. This took place on 29th July in Chicago. Brown Finch Films ( Check their excellent site), who shot the interview, also captured my 35 minute comedy routine. It's supposed to be a 'reading', but how do you read a comic book out loud? At one point I was galloping around pretending to be a horse. I'll let you know when they post some of it. Meanwhile, in the interview I mention our tv show which is in development. I'm almost ready to start telling you all about that here, and God knows how I've managed to keep it to myself for over a year. Things take forever in teleworld.


Two days after the above was shot, Chris Mautner interviewed me by phone in my New York hotel room and that's just gone up too. There are a couple of words that came out oddly due to my accent (Just been fixed), but what the hey. In these interviews I do tend to roll out a standard spiel, so if you've read one you may not want to read them all, but I do mention the tv show again here if you're fishing in that pond.
Otherwise should read Joe McCulloch's very poetic review of leotard.
My six page Constantine, from script by Pete Milligan is wrapped up and off to New York
And now I'm tired of reading about myself, so I think I'll see if my pal Dazzlin' White is available for lunch...

andrew Linstrom shows 'fifty incredible film posters from Poland.' Most interesting are the differences from their American counterparts. I'll pick a movie everyone is familiar with: The Empire Strikes Back:



Leif Peng shows the Film poster art of Mitchell Hooks.


The artist is now retired and his mid '80s. In his late career, when all the outlets for illustration were drying up and the whole trade was arriving in the doldrums, he apparently found a steady market with Harlequin romances. When I'm waiting for a bus outside Boswell Books I often peruse the covers of the romance books and wonder who painted them, what sort of artist and at what stage of his or her career.
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Silent gig 'rocks' London
The Fun Lovin' Criminals have played their first ever 'silent' gig. Fans listened to the band through headphones at a club in Camden, London. (video)
(thanks to wee hayley campbell)

Unsung hero...

at the Stafford City 2.10 showing of The Dark Knight. The geezer who rushed out after a few minutes to get them to fix the screen ratio. Hey, that was Eddie Campbell. I missed what happened for a few minutes onscreen. Next time I'll just yell (it's a very polite crowd you get on a Sunday. Nobody said a word before or after.)
Great movie anyway. I wonder if they looked at our (Campbell and White, writers, Bart Sears artist) version of Gotham General, a 44 page yarn in which the Joker planted a bomb in said hospital and succeeded in blowing up part of it. But for all I know maybe he tries it on once a year. You'll find it reprinted in a Batman/Joker collection titled Going Sane, on sale at the end of this month.

Halleluia!

B

ut otherwise, I have always thought Easter Sunday the dullest day of the year. It's the day everybody has gone home (to see the 'rents, as Callum would say), and the shops are closed and all you have are the movies you rented yesterday. In the profile of Alan Moore I linked to on Friday, it says: "He believes most modern films are not only artistic failures but "probably detrimental to modern culture." And I agree.
So what did we have to watch?
Firstly Elizabeth; the Golden Age. 'Comic book' is the default genre for the modern movie. I was able to persevere with the historical inaccuracies of this one up to the moment when Queen Elizabeth turned into Galadriel and the Sir Walter Raleigh into the Sub-Mariner. I can guess how it ended but I don't care.
There is an implicit understanding with regard to the pop singer biopic, and that is that the viewer will accept that the subject had more talent than you and me, and was the idol of the multitude, but only if it can be shown that he/she lived a life of unremitting misery, half caused by circumstance and the rest by his/her self. thus Walk the Line and the present subject, La vie en Rose, about Edith Piaf. I didn't make it to the end and I don't care.
We did take Monty for a walk on the beach. Drove for an hour then discovered we forgot to bring his leash. I went into a gas station (as the Americans would say) and had a choice between ten meters of string and one of those elastic jobs with the hooks at the ends for fastening your luggage to the roofrack. Inexplicably I bought the string and missed out on the comic possibilities of the other. Damn. Even my timing is off on Easter Sunday.

A

fter my brief mention of Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette two days back I've been giving some thought to an occasional predicament wherein the artist finds him/herself precisely dictated to with regard to how a story is to be told or depicted. Hitler may not be humanized; I have long regarded Grant Morrison's New Adventures of Hitler to be his best work, but it remains out of print after almost twenty years. Riefenstahl's Olympia may not be discussed without holding the filmmaker to account for the whole of the Holocaust, etc. This holds true also with Coppola's subject; modern France is built upon the events of the Revolution and so the story is carved in stone.
Karin Badt's oct 2006 review of the film outlines that story and castigates the filmmaker:

Coppola has blithely stated she could not care less about the political context of her subject. Marie Antoinette was not interested in politics so why should she be? Her bravado ignorance is astonishing.
For a film treating the most volatile, complicated time in France 's history -- where democracy and terror forged templates for the modern world -- it is indeed astonishing that so little happens. Coppola oddly did not take advantage of the rich details of Marie Antoinette's real life to complicate her vision.

It is implicit that the storteller is in some way wrong in imagining the events of a time prior to and untempered by history's outcome. Moral disdain is to be backdateable, and has no statute of limitations. Next the castigator, with her history book open before her, slips on a couple of problems:

She was executed, along with her husband, not as a symbol of decadent monarchy but as a political traitor.

This overlooks the fact that the winning parties in a political uprising get to *define* treason. In England in 1649 King Charles I was executed by the revolutionary forces for High Treason, and eleven years later the monarchy was restored and all the other crowd (most of whom by now had to be exhumed), who had brought down the King and instituted Parliamentary rule, were executed for the same crime.
The central and best part of the movie was its treatment of the failure of intimacy in the bedroom and its power to wither the human spirit:

The intense attention given her initial inability to have children was not a psychological issue, as portrayed in the film (Dunst is mortified about what the other ladies will think), but crucial to France 's position in Europe. The seven-year barren phase that Coppola casts as Marie's inability to seduce an asexual, dumpy husband, despite her charming curves, was not a lust problem but a medical problem. Louis XVI's member was too big to allow for a comfortable erection; an operation, cutting the foreskin, led to the dynasty's continuation.

The calamities of the bedroom not a psychological issue? What an astonishing statement! And it's not just 'the other ladies' that want to know about it. Our daily news clamors with the noise of it from the bitter greed of Mrs McCartney to Heath Ledger alone in his apartment with the sleeping pills.
George Androutsos, History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ioannina, Greece, on a website titled The History of Circumcision, finds Louis' particular problem well worth a 3752 word essay and in it he asseses the psychological impasse:
The truth about Louis XVI's marital difficulties : Could the phimosis of Louis XVI (1754-1793) have been responsible for his sexual difficulties and his delayed fertility?

Two things should be considered. Firstly, the strange relation with his own body : Louis XVI must have viewed his body as a traitor and must have been deeply troubled by it. Secondly, it is probable that he took refuge in silence.

Winding up on a less serious note, it should be remembered that a crucial rule in a pictorial medium is that you should not introduce a concept unless you intend to show it. Thus in the film there is understandably no mention of the circumcision, or whatever Louis' operation is to be called. Badt above states its occurrence as a fact while the more knowledgeable Androutsos writes,

Did he prepare himself -- as generations of historians have maintained -- for a cut so hypothetical that it left no mark in any document of the era? In truth we have no text giving precise details, either on the date of the operation, or its exact nature, or the identity of the surgeon who assumed responsibility. We must rely therefore on guesswork...

It always confounded me that in looking at late depictions of 'The Circumcision of Christ,' there is no way you could reconstruct exactly what happens at such a ceremony from these assorted paintings and engravings. The players are just arriving in their Sunday best, or waiting in the anteroom. The rest was alaways a mystery. However there appears to have been an iconographic tradition for the depiction of it that flourished in the mid-1400s, and of which this panel, attributed to the master of the Tucher Alterpiece, is a fine example.


(sorry I don't have a colour repro)

Today I watched Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. I don't understand why the Wikipedia entry has described it as 'lightweight", nor why it might have been booed at Cannes, nor why it had trouble at the box office, but then I don't understand why i have trouble either. What a magnificent film. I give it two of Ebert's thumbs and three of my own. And the soundtrack! Take a bow, Jean-Philippe Rameau, take a bow, Francois Couperin, take a bow wow wow.


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I can't find a name on it or around it, but the guy who draws 'Duty Calls"made me laugh. Go and see if he's got any more.


Update: That's Randall Munroe's work. thanks, Auz.
(via weehayleycampbell)

The sixties.

The well known exchange of dialogue from the movie Field of Dreams (1989) stuck in my mind for a long time:
Annie Kinsella:"...And if you experienced even a little bit of the sixties, you would feel the same way, too."
Beulah: [indignantly] I *experienced* the sixties.
Annie Kinsella: "No, I think you had two fifties and moved right into the seventies."

I spent the entire sixties in captivity, since the ends of the decade correspond to my ages of five and fifteen, so I guess I missed the fun part, at least in the ways that I measure fun from my present perspective. However, while I am suspicious of sentimentality for the past, It would certainly be true to say that there was something special about the sixties, from the point of view of an artist. In tandem with picking up and watching Godard's A bout de Souffle (1960) I was recently reading a book one of me pals gave me for my fiftieth birthday two years back, Revolution! :The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s, by Peter Cowie and I got to remembering how there was a time before film properties were thought of, in the terminolgy of business, as 'franchises.' That was way back when a fellow whose name I have forgotten used to take me along to seasons of Welles and Hitchcock at the National Film Theatre and I had half a notion of getting into that world, the Art of Film.

To save us all having to spend undue amounts of time excavating the ruins of that age, there's a blog doing the work for us: The World Of Kane: 'Retro candy for your eyes and ears.' It's the work of Will Kane, whose myspace shows him to be 38. His obsession with sixties is the itching, driving, all encompassing obsession of one who arrived just as they were closing the doors. Here he gives us a beautiful set of images of Vasarely's op-art paintings, and here's Sammy Davis and Anthony Newly in what looks like a Hefner setting, which is all a bit self-congratulatory and self-conscious, but I'd never seen it before, and anyway I seem to remember that being the gestalt of the sixties.

Much more precious are the three Youtube clips of Jacques Brel, a true artist who died before he was fifty.. Especially look at his 'le moribond', horribly massacred in English as the syrupy "Seasons in the Sun."
(superior direct translation of Mort Shuman)
"Goodbye Antoine, I didn't like you very much,
I am dying of dying today,
but you are full of life and more soild than boredom
...seeing that you were her lover I know that you will take care of my wife.
I want you all to laugh, all to dance, all to enjoy yourselves like crazy,
when they drop me in the hole."
and Amsterdam:
"In the port of Amsterdam there are sailors who dance,
rubbing their bellies against womens' bellies,
they turn and they dance like suns spit out,
to the sound of a rancid accordion."

Kane has been collecting the sixties since Oct 2005, so there's a lot of browsing to be done. His latest post is about comic book stylist Jim Steranko. He shows the famous censored page from SHIELD #2, but the supposed original version has always looked bogus to me, with that clunky drawing of the figures, as though Jim concocted it after the event just for a good yarn. The way it was printed looks superior to these eyes. In an earlier post Kane has scanned the whole romance story that Steranko drew.
(thanks to drjon for the link)


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One of my regular correspondents emailed and asked me to explain the 'asscrusher' story from my Feb 11 post.

Tony Consiglio was working in an appliance store and got a phone order for an 'asscrusher' from a lady down South
The great thing about Tony's telling of the story is that he strings it out for ages and the listener can't get it, so this is the very short version:

"Lady, if you don't mind me asking, what do you need an asscrusher for?"
"Are you making a fool of me? you need an ass-crusher to crush youah ass!"

Tony keeps trying to find ways to clarify the query, until finally it clicks:

"And when you've crushed it, where do you keep your ass."
"Are you stupid, mister? You keep youah ass in the ass box to put in youah drinks."

(I've been tampering with the phonetics in the above all day...sigh...)

oh no, here's another:
Tolkien Estate Sues New Line Cinema

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The estate of "Lord of the Rings" creator J.R.R. Tolkien is suing the film studio that released the trilogy based on his books, claiming the company hasn't paid it a penny from the estimated $6 billion the films have grossed worldwide. The suit, filed Monday, claims New Line was required to pay 7.5 percent of gross receipts to Tolkien's estate and other plaintiffs, who contend they only received an upfront payment of $62,500 for the three movies before production began.

(Thanks, Mick Evans)

I watched Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and enjoyed it. I watched it again the next night. I daresay it has got no more resemblance to historical fact than did his Braveheart, in which the famous Battle of Stirling Bridge was restaged in the middle of a field. But I like that movie too. To argue that they are not true to their sources is to operate on the presumption that they ought to be. It's like expecting te circus to be true to facts. Indeed it would make more sense to say that facts were not faithful to the movie that would eventually be made.

My World

After many years of thinking about it, I have at last found access to dubs of one of my favourite tv shows of all time (thanks Gareth). These are not official and I can't point you in any direction. In fact the quality is somewhere close to looking at the picture through a woolly cardigan.
The title was called My World and Welcome to it. It was a half hour comedy series that ran for one season of 26 episodes over 1969-70, and then won an Emmy after it was cancelled. It starred William Windom as a cartoonist, John Monroe.


I bumped into the actor, now in his eighties, three(?) years back as we were both exiting the San Diego comic con. He was there I guess because he had a prominent role in an episode of Star Trek. He didn't really want to stop and chat until he realized I was raving and complimenting him on the best tv comedy of all time, which was really HIS show. He later took a one-man stage version of it on the road. It was based on the cartoons and stories of James Thurber, animated versions of whose drawings periodically intervene in the drama. The stage version (damn I wish I'd seen it, but I was sixteen and had no money for the run into London) used a lot of cut-out cartoons like the one of the dog in this promo photo for the tv series.


The opening sequence of each episode was usually a variation on the Thurber drawing of a house morphing into a woman:


I managed to find two different photographed tv screens on the net that show how it worked. The live action figure of Monroe (Windom) would be speaking a little monologue that would lead into the story as he arrived home from the office (he was the cartoonist at a new York magazine) and entered the house. The house would usually start talking and we'd segue into the conversation between Monroe and his wife:


I've just finished watching the sixth episode. Windom has drawn a cartoon of two hippos looking at each other . The caption reads 'You look much better since you lost the weight.' The editor doesn't get it. Which one's speaking? It doesn't matter. They're identical. One of them's got to be speaking. Okay, it's that one. Well it's mouth isn't open.
Windom resigns and storms out...

When is somebody going to put the series on DVD for god's sake!!!????

Wee Cal brought home the Rocketeer on Dvd. I'd forgotten what great fun that movie is. Made in 1991 it was the first movie based on the work of a comic-book guy of my own generation (Dave Stevens was born just two weeks ahead of me). Checking the Wiki entry I see it had a tough time making it to the screen, being first optoned in '85. It stands up well today. The comic book followed the traditional route from sinking ship to sinking ship, Eclipse to Comico, before landing at Dark Horse just as I was leaving. An editor once said to me that Stevens was the only artist he knew of whose work on a cover could guarantee a significant number of extra sales. I only ever spoke to Dave twice I think, both times in San Diego, once in an elevator and once in a hotel forecourt. I have some very dear friends that i've met almost as often. I wonder what he's doing now.

Bowler hats and gas masks.

My pal White was pleased with the dvd cover of the old 1960 League of Gentlemen movie. I searched around and found this landscape format version at Retro to Go: a guide to all things hip and retro, an excellent blog with all kinds of old goodies.


It reminds me that a few weeks back we were talking in comments about the sad state of current movie poster design.
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Checking my stats I see that some poor sod got here with the search 'not adequate with my penis'. I wonder if he found the answer.
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Short post. Deadline on an important job. Working all day Sunday. I'll talk about it later if it works out.

Munch

I took up Don Murphy's invitation (in comments here last week) and went to the 'premeere' (as they pronounce it in the USA) of his new production Shoot'em Up written and directed by Michael Davis (who introduced the film with the bubbling enthusiasm of a real 'fan'), starring Clive Owen and Monica Bellucci. I enjoyed this thing, with its brazenly unpretentious title (I'll take it any day over the Bourne Preposterousness). And the title does indeed describe the entire contents of the ride. That plus a couple of unlikely characters, a gun-juggling tough guy shooter in the usual mould, plus a lactating hooker, being stuck in the situation of saving a baby. The explanation for why an army of asassins is trying to off the infant is clever enough to take our mind off the improbability of the premise, but much less interesting than the mayhem which it justifies. The story taps into something of an archetype and I'm struggling to line it up in my noodle. I did a wee story a long time ago titled Dapper John Minds the Baby, in which I was consciously lifting Damon Runyon's Butch Minds the Baby. In the latter a safe-cracker is minding a baby to help out a poor girl who is having trouble making ends meet, but he gets called off on a heist and takes the baby along with him. I mention this to suggest that there is in fact a lttle more going on in the present movie that just the relentless shooting 'em up, though that is done with enough imagination to keep Campbell awake to midnight. There is a fantasy in which we may momentarily in our imagination set aside the fear that being responsible for a wee'un will lead to cosy slippers and resignation to a life of unremitting dullness. And who'd have thought Paul Giammtti would make such a convincing heavy?
A few stills here. Owen eats carrots all through the piece, which is a fun schtick. I enjoyed the one I was handed on the way out. Thanks, Don. munch.

captive audience.

New Zealand Air provides your own movie screen on the back of the seat in front, and your own set of controls, and a decent selection of recent films and classics, so I caught up with some of the movies I've been missing while I've had my head down finishing The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard.
300 to begin with. Greece must be one of the brightest places in the world. Here it's the colour of the varnish on old oil paintings. It's most interesting when Miller's still pictures are translated to moving ones. I can willingly suspend disbelief as well the next person, but some standard movie set-ups occasionally break my involvement, for instance the ending just like the one in Braveheart. But why is the bard leading the assembled armies of Greece?
A couple of lovely English historical things I was better able to lose my self in: Becoming Jane about Jane Austen's moment of truth. Hard enough to decide to make your way in the world as a writer, but being a woman and being in the nineteenth century.
Amazing Grace starring Ioan Grufudd and a some of the best living British actors Ian Richardson (no, wait, he was in the Jane Austen movie. must have been one he made before he died, as my mum would say. hi, Mum!) Michael Gambon etc.. the story of William Wilberforce, the Man who tirelessly railed against the evil of slavery and eventually won its abolition in Britain in 1807. A great movie about a great man whom we should all know more about. The title comes from the song written by John Newton who also plays a role in the story, played by Albert Finney.
Lonely heart with Travolta and Gandolfini, who also does the spoken narration, as a pair of detectives in a 1940s story that is probably based on a true case. It plays well, and convincingly, with none of the stupid compromises that usually go into movies, though some of that narration sounds a bit too self consciously hard boiled.
Wee cal chose Ghost Rider, that nutty skating thing with Will Farrell and The Shooter. He watched 300 for 15 minutes then switched to a vid game. I was sitting close enough I could probably review all those too, even without the sound.
When my eyes got tired i found a whole cd's worth of Jacques Loussier doing his jazz thing to two Mozart piano concertos (#20 and #23). Must buy the cd and listen some more.

"Everybody out of the pool!"

O ver the last month I've had four meetings with a duo of tv producers. I can't say more about that right now, and will have to leave it dangling there. But we got talking about shared enthusiasms, one of which is the films of Norman Jewison, and one of these fine chaps lent me the recent autobiography (sept 2005) of the esteemed director. Jewison is the only movie director I can think of that I ever followed movie by movie as they came out, from Fiddler on the Roof through Rollerball, while simultaneously scrutinising the tv guides to catch up with his back catalogue (this was even before home videotape). Thus virtually everything he had done previously came within reach: In the Heat of the Night, The Cincinatti Kid and the gorgeously stylish Thomas Crown Affair. Even his early Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy and The Art of Love with Dick van Dyke and James Garner, a daft story of which I was fond enough that it brought itself to mind and was referred to in the Fate of the Artist (page 27). I lost interest in the details after Rollerball, which interestingly, Jewison also does in his own book (making exceptions for Moonstruck ('87), and The Hurricane ('99) and maybe he did a little in actuality too.


Reading Jewison's book reminded me of a few things I'd forgotten, such as that In the Heat of the Night won the oscar for best movie the same year Mike Nichols won for best director with The Graduate. And it filled in a couple of later things I had wondered about.There are not so many movies made these days that a large number of people can eke careers out of the big screen. You find yourself impressed with an actor but never ever see him or her again. What happened to Carl Anderson, the black guy who played Judas in the 1973 Jesus Christ Superstar? He played the part again on on stage, it's estimated, another twelve hundred times. He died of leukemia in 2004 while gearing up to launch a worldwide revival of the show that was to begin at the Vatican.

I got hold of Rollerball a couple of years back to rewatch it with wee cal. He loved it. I think he even appreciated the original's superior sense of drama in comparison to the remake, which was aimed more at his generation and was full of all sorts of violent novelties. I actually didn't mind the remake, in the way that I don't mind all the rest of the mindless and meaningless blather of life on Planet Earth, though I gather it wasn't a success. And for meaningless blather, to be sure, I'd be much happier watching James Garner accidentally drive his convertible into the swimming pool in The Thrill of it All.
Which reminds me of the brilliant scene in the Rockford Files ten or so years later, where Rockford/Garner is driving a bunch of mafiosi who mean to do him harm, and he veers suddenly through a high wooden fence into a residential property and the car comes to rest in the pool. Rockford gets out first and is sitting on the diving board holding a gun which he nabbed in the confluffle. And he speaks the immortal line which prevailed in our house for many years at the end of bathtime (and you can ask wee hayley campbell) (the series was showing daily in the mornings in the year I am about to refer to, 1988):
"Right, everybody out of the pool."

It was Fiddler on the Roof that won me in the first place (and recently enjoyed afresh with director's commentary). Hard to believe now, but this movie came out back in the days when for big special movies they would sometimes produce a glossy souvenir brochure, and there would be an intermission halfway through the movie like half time at the football. In fact it was the lobby cards that drew me in. They were out in the street behind glass. I was fifteen, in London for the first time (from Glasgow. I am at home in the big city) it was a cinema off Holborn, around the Southampton Row area I think. I fell in love with one of Tevye's daughters in the still photo. Years later I was doing a five pager for The Comic Book of First Love (Virago 1988), which the editors resold to Penguin (1991... and partnered it with The Penguin Comic Book of the Facts of Life, for which I also drew a five pager, but that's another story). It was a great idea, a little book slightly larger than a regualr paperback. Anway, 1988, just short of twenty years ago and I was now living I Australia. I couldn't think of anything to say about an actual first love, so I drew my story about my unrequited movie love. Here's a page from the story: Somehow I've got myself into the story wth Tevye, and things are already going so badly for him that I haven't the heart to tell him that a worthless art student has a crush on his daughter, so I end up just helping him load his milk wagon. The year after I drew this was the first year I count in which I made a living from my art. If memory serves, I made around six or seven thousand bucks in 1988 and was otherwise supported by the wife of my bosom. The following year I was up to $18,999 and continued my fast rise from there to the high and mighty perch from which you now see me dangling, where I please myself with the thought that some of my own meaningless blather might make it onto the (small) screen.

The Sopraners

The night before.

hayley campbell: hope your sopranos party went well. tell me anything about the episode before i've waved the flag and i'll put my foot in your ass. i'm heading over to JP's place after work where we're going to watch sopranos, cry a bit, then hang ourselves because there's nothing left to live for. it's our sopranos suicide party. he's got a tv so we're watching it there rather than my place (where we'd have to sellotape our heads together to get the right angle on my mac screen) which means that there's no oven. ah well. jam and toast fer tea probably. i suggested we whack someone on the way home too, for authenticity's sake…

(s-p-o-i-l-e-r ---w-a-r-n-i-n-g)

The morning papers:

The Morning After: Did Tony Soprano whack Game 2 of the NBA Finals?-Cleveland Plain Dealer.

So this is how it ends: with a big, raised middle finger aimed straight at the TV audience," -Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times.

Fade to Black Has 'Sopranos' Fans Seeing Red-Washington Post.
A bunch, who were way mad at the way Chase had messed with them in the finale, started messing with his Wikipedia entry. Finally, the brain trust at Wikipedia locked the page from further "editing" until June 18, citing "vandalism."

hayley campbell: the scene went like this: it stops abruptly at the end at a point of high tension. the screen goes black. i say 'oh fuck your hard-drive just shat itself at THAT POINT!' and JP leaps off the sofa and starts hitting the thing, near tears. it's black for about 7 seconds and then the credits roll. 'no. no i don't believe it. not a word of it. i downloaded two in case one was fucked. let's check.' so we run to his computer and play the last scene. that's it, that's what happens. 'DAVID CHASE CAN EAT MY BALLS!' shouts campbell. i'm furious, called Chase all the the rude words i know, JP said he was off to hang himself. but then if they'd gone out with a bloodbath i would have hated them for the cliche.
jp's not in today. i sent him a text saying 'i can't believe you hanged yourself - it's only a bloody tv show!' turns out he's actually ill and has been scooted off to hospital. see? the manipulative aspects of the sopranos can bloody well DO YOU IN!
I bet you like the last episode. i bet someone a tea you'd like the last episode.

Eddie Campbell: I larfed. I wished I could end so well

hayley campbell: good. i'm owed a tea then. What did the mammy think of it?

Eddie Campbell: Well, it finished ten minutes ago and the mammy is still in front of the tv blue screen hoping something else will come up.
To put it musically: It modulated back into the tonic, gathered to a climax and then the cadence was witheld. But in strict musical terms that's just a formality. returning to the tonic key supplies the resolution.
p.s. not sure you read me right earlier. You said “thought i was going to die! and I said “maybe you did-- did the soundtrack suddenly stop?

hayley campbell: you're making a funny, aren't you. chris ware has broken my eyes and david chase took care of my mind. the theory that the soundtrack suddenly stopping was Tony getting whacked.

Eddie Campbell: i was asking if YOUR soundtrack suddenly stopped, which would be an indication that you had died, rather than the malfunctioning of your breathing, the ceasing of your heart or any other of the traditional indicators, including falling over with your head under the wheel of a car...

hayley campbell: haha. leapt off my chair when his head went splat. got wine on my jeans.

Eddie Campbell: well, we're all off to bed I think... the mammy is still waiting for that bit that comes after the credits, even though we pulled out the plug an hour ago. nitey nite, honeybee.

hayley campbell: night night par, i loves ya. X

Eddie Campbell: nitey nite, Phil Leotartdi; nitey nite, Silvio Dante; Christopher Moltesante; Bobby Baccala; nitey nite, Sopraners.

may you all Rest In Pizzas.